Oracle WebCenter is the user engagement platform for social business—connecting people and information.

Social Business: Evolution or Revolution?

At the Enterprise 2.0 show in Boston three years ago, I made
a splash during the keynote panel by arguing that social business was
evolutionary, not revolutionary. This
wasn’t the most popular stance at the time, and it was back when I was with
Microsoft, which wasn’t the most popular vendor at a conference dominated by
startups. I sure did get a lot of
attention though and whether people saw social business as an evolution or
revolution became an informal theme of that conference and led to some very
interesting and fun debates with social thought leaders such as Ross Mayfield,
Thomas Vander Wal, Dion Hinchcliffe, and many others.

Fast forward three years later, and the evidence suggests
that I was wrong. Social business really is a revolution, one that is causing
rapidly accelerating change in how companies and customers engage with one
another and how employees work together. The perception and rate of change is, however,
being experienced differently between line of business units on the one hand
and organizational IT on the other.

The business side is eager to seize on innovations that can
help improve marketing, sales, customer service, and brand reputation. iPads, for example, are becoming a necessity
for sales and field service personnel in many organizations, and if these
aren’t being supplied by the company, the sales people are bringing their own
tablets to work—and demanding that the applications they need from the back
office run on those iPads. Bloomberg
recently cited
an IDG Connect survey which found that 51% of managers say they always use the
iPad at work, 40% say they sometimes do, and 79% said they use the iPad for
work outside of business hours. Business
users are at the gates of IT with torches—on their iPads.

IT, however, is more reticent to adopt social tools, at
least outside of IT itself. Enterprise 2.0 as a term, after all, was coined by
Andy McAfee after studying a bank’s IT department’s use of social tools in this
seminal
paper that started it all. But the
consumerist convergence of social, mobile, local, and cloud technologies
challenges long held IT paradigms of command and control, locked down systems,
systematic rollouts, and long cycle application development. These approaches have served well in the era
of client/server and with large application deployments such as ERP. But they don’t fit with the emergent, chaotic,
rapidly changing consumerization era in which we now find ourselves, so
different from even just three years ago. It is a huge shift, for example, to think of your
intranet as a large set of individual apps served up to mobile devices based on
user need and interest—the way people consume apps today in their personal
lives—and not as a monolithic portal that’s PC centric and is one size fits
all, with most of the content touched by a minority of users.

A telling illustration of the conflict for IT comes from a
conversation I had with a CIO of a major outsourcer at a tradeshow when the
iPad had first come out. We were talking
technology and he ticked off the list of all the reasons why he would not write
iOS devices into outsourcing his contracts. They weren’t secure enough, the CIO
said; he couldn’t get a confirmed wipe of application data, and without that
his firm was exposed to liability for data loss in the event of lost
devices. And so, if you were a client of
his firm, your employees would not be able to use iPads. After we wound up that discussion, I offered
to find a time at the show to demo a new device we were working on
privately. The CIO said, “sure, let me
see what times I have available”, and promptly proceeded to open up his iPad to
schedule our meeting!

Anyway, you don’t have to take my word on the subject of
whether social business is an evolution or a revolution in how we work
today. This week we have invited
Capgemini’s Global CTO, Andy Mulholland of Capgemini, to share his perspectives
in our first Oracle
Social Business Thought Leaders Webcast Series webcast tomorrow at 10:00am PT.
Andy has given a lot of thought to the implications of social disruption for
both business and IT, and this week in our webcast he’ll discuss these in
detail and offer frameworks for business and IT to come to the same mental
model and work together in this new era of computing.

If you are not familiar with Andy’s work , he was rated one
of the top 25 most influential CTOs in the world in 2009 by InfoWorld and his Capgemini CTO Blog has been voted
as the best Blog for Business Managers and CIOs each year for the last three
years by the readers of Computing Weekly. Andy’s role at one of the world’s
largest global technology consultancies gives him a unique vantage point to see
changes across many industries around world. Our webcast
will cover plenty of thought-provoking ideas, and I hope you’ll join us.

About

Oracle WebCenter is the center of engagement for business—powering
exceptional experiences for customers, partners, and employees. It connects
people, process, and information with the most complete portfolio of portal,
Web experience management, content, imaging and collaboration technologies.